WORST VACATION EVER

(Okay, just go ahead and say it like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons: Worst. Vacation. Ever.)

Today is my first day back at the office after the waterborn toxic even that left us all office-less for six week. And it feels good. I had mixed feelings about going back. I'd kind of settled into a nice groove rolling out of bed and into the office. But I think if I'd stayed much longer I would have settled into a nice funk as well. I always already starting to feel it this week when, until I came up with a "to do" list and made myself work through it, felt a bit directionless. It didn't help that the pile of crap I kept bringing home from the temporary office the business staff was using was piling up around my feet. I never realized just how weak the signal-to-noise ratio in all the promo CDs and DVDs we get in until my home became a depository for it all.

It's weird: I could probably swing being a full-time freelancer (emotionally, at least... I'm not sure I could make it work financially.) And I don't mind an office routine, especially since my company is pretty understanding about letting us work at home when we need to. (Which for me is about three times a month when I can't stand the distractions of human company in any form any more.) But this working at home while working for a company business is not an enviable life. There were times I would have loved to have taken my laptop to a library or a coffee shop but couldn't because I felt I needed to be near a phone. And I did. There were fires that had to get put out daily. And there were plenty of days I would have loved to have said "screw it" and just gone shopping for records and comics all day. But I couldn't do that either.

It was getting old and I kept having this urge to cut my hair off that didn't pass until today. (Not in a Britney-sort-of-way. Just much shorter after intentionally growing it out into a moppy thing for a while. Why? I don't know. Blame it on the quasi-shut-in lifestyle. I also realized that, apart from Stevie, I wasn't really talking to anyone else and kind of losing the touch for it. A few more weeks and I'm pretty sure I would have turned into Max Von Sydow in Hannah And Her Sisters. ("Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling?")

So I welcome the return to office life, even though our office is still problematic. I'm going to try set up a little isolated office within the office so I can have some privacy for once. We'll see how that goes. Also, it's orange. Really orange. How orange? This orange:




Yeah. That orange.